A new image format for the Web

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and
lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web
developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.

How WebP Works

Lossy WebP compression uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same
method used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive
coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values
in a block, and then encodes only the difference.

Lossless WebP compression uses already seen image fragments in order to
exactly reconstruct new pixels. It can also use a local palette if no
interesting match is found.

A WebP file consists of VP8 or VP8L image data, and a container
based on RIFF. The standalone libwebp library serves as a reference
implementation for the WebP specification, and is available from
our git repository or as a tarball.

WebP Support

WebP is natively supported in Google Chrome and the Opera browser, and by
many other tools and software libraries. Developers have also added
support to a variety of image editing tools.

WebP includes the lightweight encoding and decoding library libwebp
and the command line tools cwebp and dwebp for converting
images to and from the WebP format, as well as tools for viewing, muxing and
animating WebP images. The full source code is available on the
download page.